Chance’s expression remained frozen, except that his eyebrows shot up. “If your information is correct,” he said, “then it is most distressing to me. How, may I ask,” he said, turning toward Holly, “did your agency come by this knowledge?”
“We learned that a four-man team of professionals were hired to interrogate a member of the Russian organization, in order to learn the name of the person in your prefecture.”
“Ah! And what is the name, according to the interrogatee?”
“I’m afraid that the interrogatee, who, unknown to his interrogators, had a serious medical condition, died before he could reveal the name, in spite of having been questioned under stressful conditions for three hours. He refused to speak at all.”
Chance threw up his hands. “Well,” he said, “that is most disappointing. Perhaps if his interrogators had come to me I might have been able to help in the interrogation, without actually killing the interrogatee.”
“It was unfortunate,” Holly said, “but beyond the scope of my agency. We learned of the situation only after the fact, from a confidential informant.”
“Perhaps, if I could speak to your informant?”
“I’m told that he has left France, and his name is unknown to me.”
Dino spoke up. “I should say that, in spite of the disappointing nature of this information, it has revealed, to the satisfaction of the Agency, that this spy in your prefecture exists, and that is important intelligence in itself.”
“Important, but frustrating,” Chance said. “Tell me, was this Agency able to learn any details of this spy, other than he is, as you say, ‘highly placed’?”
“Regrettably,” Holly said, “we have no other information about him, but we thought it important, as well as a necessary professional courtesy, to tell you what we had learned.”
“Of course, I appreciate your professional courtesy,” Chance said, “and I would be most grateful if you would continue to pass along any further information that you might acquire in the future.”
“Certainly, we will,” Holly said. “However, all of us in this room will be leaving France quite soon, so I will ask our Paris station chief, Richard LaRose, whom I understand you know, to communicate directly with you should he come into new information.”
Chance looked at his watch. “If you will excuse me,” he said, rising, “I have another engagement.” He turned to Mirabelle, who was showing no signs of moving. “And so do you,” he said pointedly.
Reluctantly, Mirabelle got to her feet. Goodbyes were said, hands were kissed, and Prefect Chance and his sister made their exit.
“Well,” Holly said after they had gone, “she was really quite interesting, wasn’t she?”
31
As they were finishing their drinks, Holly’s cell phone rang, and she answered it. “Yes? Hi.” She listened for a moment, then covered the phone. “Lance is on the phone. He wants us to have dinner with him.”
“Do we have to?” Stone asked.
“He says he has more information about Simpson.”
“Dino? Viv?”
They both shrugged and nodded.
“Okay, where?”
Holly asked the question and was answered. “At Le Restaurant de L’Hôtel,” she said. “Thirteen Rue des Beaux-Arts.”
“At the restaurant at the hotel?” Stone asked. “Sounds pretty generic.”
“L’Hôtel is the hotel where Oscar Wilde died, Lance said. I suppose Le Restaurant is their restaurant. He’s on his way there now.”
Stone summoned the van, and they went downstairs. “I’ve begun to think of this thing as my hearse,” he said, as they boarded. Ten minutes later they drew to a halt in a narrow street, and waited while the two men up front cased the block and pronounced it safe.
They entered the hotel, where someone at the front desk told them to proceed straight ahead. They passed through a comfortable bar and emerged into a small but lushly decorated dining room. Lance sat at a table in the rear of the room, and he waved them over. Stone noted that, in contrast to his appearance that morning, he was now freshly groomed and wearing a beautifully tailored suit. Lance seated the party so that the women were on either side of him, and he ordered their drinks from memory.
“I thought you would like to know that there is a restaurant in Paris that stocks Knob Creek,” he said to Stone.
“I’m relieved to hear it,” Stone replied. “I managed to force the bar at l’Arrington to serve it, but it’s scarce on the ground in this town.”
Their drinks arrived and they were given menus. “It’s a short menu,” Lance said, “but everything on it is good. They have a star from Michelin, and I’m sure they’d have another, if they could expand the carte.
“How did your meeting with M’sieur Chance go?” Lance asked after they had ordered.
“It was brief,” Stone said, wondering how Lance knew of the meeting. “I had been told that Chance detests people who aren’t policemen, so I asked Dino to give him what news we had.”
“And his reaction?”
“Annoyance that we didn’t give him more,” Stone said. “He as much as said that, if he had been conducting the interrogation of the Russian, we would now know everything.”
“Who’s to say he’s wrong?” Lance asked.
“I was told you now have more information about John, no middle initial, Simpson.”
“I do,” Lance said, “by the simple expedient of releasing his service record to myself. Unfortunately, because of its restricted reading list, I can’t show it to any of you, but I can tell you what’s in it—there’s no restriction on that, as long as the recipients of the information are properly cleared, and I have the power to clear you all, just like that!” He snapped his fingers, then made the sign of the cross. “You are, as of this moment, all cleared, my children. Your clearance expires when the bill for dinner arrives, and you must never reveal anything I have told you, on pain of a polite refusal at the gates of heaven.”
“Why don’t you just give us the high points, Lance?” Stone asked.
“I’m afraid there aren’t any high points, Stone, only low ones. It seems that ‘Simps,’ as he was called by those who pretended to be his friends, lived his life moving from one low point to another. I am ashamed that such people are an absolute necessity if one expects to operate an effective intelligence service.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Stone said.
“Can you summarize, Lance?” Holly asked.
“Well, let’s see: he was, as you know, brought to our attention by Our Man in Afghanistan, who had seen him maim and kill his way through the various mountain passes and villages, then sit down at dinner and eat two steaks. He arrived at the Farm for training having already learned just about everything one needs to know about killing another. He was especially adept at the use of almost any sort of blade. One of his trainers said that with a couple of weeks’ training, he could have won Olympic Gold with the épée. That amounts to high praise from such a figure.”
“Not the guy you’d want to meet in a dark alley,” Dino said.
“Not the guy you’d want to meet anywhere,” Lance said. “In the army, he fired expert with every weapon they handed him, and at the Farm, he amazed his tutors by hitting everything he saw from the hip—no actual aiming of a weapon. As they got to evaluate him and know him better they found they had discovered a man, not only with no conscience but with no scruples or, for that matter, pity, either. One instructor entered the following in his training record: ‘He is the kind of man to whom you could say, go kill these three people and report back in a week, and he’d be home for supper, wiping the blood off his hands.’”
“Jesus,” Holly said.
“Quite. And when you think of the sort of people who wrote these evaluations, who are not easily impressed by the capacity for mayhem of others, it all becomes especially chilling. Every fitness report written by everyone he ever reported to makes note of, as one supervising officer put it, ‘not his courage, but more his absolute lack of fear of anything or anybody.’ The two things are very different—the latter, I think, tends to be psychotic.”